by: gma - 28th January 2010

Full review

In reading a few of these reviews, I see Snowshoe generates some widely varied opinions. How about one from a detached 3rd party New Englander who decided to check this place and a couple other mid-Atlantic hills out in a bizarre year where Snowshoe was within a couple inches of Jay Peak’s year-to-date snowfall on Martin Luther King Day? This place has enough terrain to keep someone interested for two days. If you want to work at it, you can probably pretty much legitimately claim to have skied it out on an uncrowded weekday but, you won’t have much time for the second beer at lunch. It isn’t tough to see why the resort is at the top of the hill. The exposure with the majority of the terrain bottoms out at the shore of an impounded pond which, if it weren’t for the dam, would simply be a headwaters swamp. That being said, it’s still a nice setting to ski in. The studio condo I chose was functional and clean but not in any way memorable for the price. It was a few hundred yards from the top of a lift. So, like pretty much everything else here, it was easy but not instant. I’d ask Intrawest to replace the CTEC triples that I’m sure can get bogged down during busy periods to justify your absurd $77 mid-week retail ticket price. Two fast chairs in the whole place aren’t enough for that kind of money. Brings Stratton to mind. Sorry, getting off track and done griping cause this place is actually pretty fun. Most of the terrain coming up from the pond consists of variously pitched cruisers steepening from skier’s left to right. Each of the 5 or so chairs that fan out from the pond to the top of the ridge effectively serves a half-dozen or so fall-line runs of its own. I’m also thinking that even the chair serving the mildest trails is at or near 1000 vertical feet which gives everyone access to nice long runs. Nothing here will give an advanced skier pause at all but, it is a good layout on a good hill. A group of skiers with various abilities could split up, each having a great time on whatever aspect of the hill they chose, and easily meet at the bottom for beers or lunch at the lake shore whenever they felt like it. I got to ski corn in the sun and butter in the shade on a pleasant day and really enjoyed it. I was dumb enough to leave a couple goodies including the Western Territory for the next day having not paid enough attention to the weather. We had freezing rain that night. The next day left the options of either skiing corduroy hard enough to bounce you off the tiller ridges anytime you weren’t on a solid edge or, yesterday’s skied-up, rained-on, re-frozen, rock hard corn snow. Fog and freezing mist and rain were additional treats. So, not having been off the back where the most advanced turns at the resort are, I chose to ski Cupp Run which was of the ungroomed, re-frozen variety. If this were actually serious ski terrain, it would not have been skiable at all that day. That being said, it felt like it would be a really enjoyable run with good conditions. I say felt because visibility was about two turns. The Silver Creek area requires a short shuttle run to what is a smaller, stand-alone area where they offer night skiing. Not a whole lot to it but, worth checking out. I have a feeling that if I were a resident of the region, I’d think of this place a little like I consider Killington, annoyed with the corporate resort price to quality of service provided ratio and willing to drive past plenty of stuff to get there anyway knowing what I can get under my boots when I click in compared to the terrain I drove past to get there.